If you’re working for a paid search agency or freelancing on your own schedule, approaching your clients for additional budget can be a daunting task. How much should I ask for? What will they get in return for their additional investment? Well, I’m glad you asked because these are important things to consider before bringing this conversation up with a client. Fortunately, AdWords offers up a great metric you can leverage while you’re drafting a proposal, known as impression share.
What is Impression Share?
Impression share is a competitive metric that represents your ad impressions in comparison to the total number of impressions available to advertisers in your target market. For example, think of your target market as a pie and your impression share as a slice of that pie. Therefore, it’s our job to make sure your clients own as much of the pie as reasonably possible.
Although there are a few different types of impression share available, we’re primarily interested in analyzing Lost Impression Share due to Budget for the purpose of this article. Let’s take a look at how impression share can help you attain additional budget from your clients.
Leveraging Lost Impression Share For More Budget
Lost IS (budget) represents the percentage of impressions missed due to insufficient budget. Using the example above, this tells me that my ads missed out on 2.17% of the total impressions available for my target market due to budget restrictions alone. Although it might be easy to look at this as an unavoidable limitation, it is also just as easy to view this as an opportunity to increase visibility and traffic. So, back to my initial questions:
How much additional budget should I ask for?
The first thing you will want to do is determine your current daily spend for your campaigns. Using the example above, you can see that I’m currently spending $570 each day.
Next, use the interface budget estimator to determine anticipated daily spends by clicking on the small graph symbol, as indicated above. Tying this back to our example, you can see that Campaign C is currently limited by its $95 daily budget.
After you click on the small graph symbol, your screen should look like the one above. The table will show your current budget in relation to the new budget recommended by the AdWords system.
Record the new recommended budgets in your spreadsheet as demonstrated above. Repeat this process for each of your campaigns as necessary. After you’ve collected current vs. potential spend, calculate your new daily spend. Multiply that value by 30 (days) to get an average of what your campaigns are capable of spending on a monthly basis as well. The example above reveals that I could potentially spend $2,670 more each month.
What will the client gain from this additional investment?
Once you have collected your current vs. potential spend data, you also need to be prepared to show the client what they will receive in return. Depending on what your client’s goals are, you could go about this a few ways.
Your first option is to simply show them how many additional clicks they could potentially gain each month. From our example in the previous section, Campaign C could be potential receive 4-5 more clicks per day. Record these values for the rest of your campaigns and multiply the total by 30 (days). For example, if $89 could generate 11 more clicks each day, you could then tell your client that their account is capable of generating roughly 330 more clicks each month if budget is increased by $2,670 (at an $8 average cost per click).
Another option is to show your client how many extra conversions they could potentially receive. If we know that the client could gain roughly 330 more clicks each month, you can multiply this value by your conversion rate over the past 30 days to give you a feel for how many conversions would result. For example, lets say that our conversion rate for the past 30 days is 3%. Using the formula above, we can then tell the client that their account could gain roughly 10 more conversions each month with an additional $2,670 budget.
A Win-Win Situation
Although asking your clients for more budget can seem like a daunting task, this should never be the case. As long as you come prepared with actionable data and resulting benefits, your clients will be much more likely to grant you that additional spend you’ve been asking for. More often than not, this becomes a win-win situation for both parties.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave those below. Thanks for reading.
